This plugin hasnt been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Genesis Widgetized Archive

Description

New Flexibility plus Enhanced User Experience

Take control over Your Archive Pages in Genesis again! Use the ever popular way of Widgets to build your own archive listing or sitemap-like content. Use up to three columns that are responsive and enable automatically. Don’t lose your archive/sitemap creations if you ever switch the Genesis child theme.

General Features

Adds up to three new widget areas (Sidebars) for the “Archive Page Template”

Adds very few CSS styles for the content area to properly divide widgets with some more space (all other styling is recommended via your child theme) and to enable responsive content columns (if more than one widget area is active)

Customizeable via 2 action hooks: if ever needed you can add content before and after the widgetized section

Customizeable via 6 filters: if ever needed you can customize the widget titles and descriptions

Fully internationalized! Real-life tested and developed with international users in mind!

Fully WPML compatible!

Fully Multisite compatible, you can also network-enable it if ever needed (per site use is recommended).

Translations

For custom and update-secure language files please upload them to /wp-content/languages/genesis-widgetized-archive/ (just create this folder) – This enables you to use fully custom translations that won’t be overridden on plugin updates. Also, complete custom English wording is possible with that as well, just use a language file like genesis-widgetized-archive-en_US.mo/.po to achieve that.

Note: All my plugins are internationalized/ translateable by default. This is very important for all users worldwide. So please contribute your language to the plugin to make it even more useful. For translating I recommend the awesome “Codestyling Localization” plugin and for validating the “Poedit Editor”, which works fine on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Idea Behind / Philosophy

I never really enjoyed the bundled “Archive” page template in Genesis. So I always wanted this template/ area a bit more easily customizeable since I first worked with Genesis! Widgets in WordPress are powerful and allow for adding really diverse and custom stuff – all in a very simple and user-friendly way. The approach of this plugin is to bring more power to the webmasters and users and help avoid other “archive” or “sitemaps” plugins and instead use the powerful tools from WordPress and Genesis that are already there. This plugin here works primarily as a ‘helper’ or ‘bridge’ plugin to just do that :).

Then go to the “Widgets” admin page and configure your widgets for the “Archive Page Template #1 – #3”.

Enjoy your new archive page 🙂

Note: The “Genesis Framework” is required for this plugin in order to work. If you don’t own a copy it yet, this premium parent theme has to be bought. More info about that you’ll find here: http://ddwb.me/getgenesis

Usage: The plugin adds 3 new widget areas on your Widget Admin. Just place any widget in the #1 area and if you want to have columns use the optional 2nd and/ or 3rd area. That’s all. Enjoy!

Also note: This plugin needs NO settings page. You only need your default page edit screen and your widgets admin. Simplifying and no overbloat – you get the idea :).

Own translation/wording: For custom and update-secure language files please upload them to /wp-content/languages/genesis-widgetized-archive/ (just create this folder) – This enables you to use fully custom translations that won’t be overridden on plugin updates. Also, complete custom English wording is possible with that, just use a language file like genesis-widgetized-archive-en_US.mo/.po to achieve that (for creating one see the tools on “Other Notes”).

FAQ

Installation Instructions

NOTE: Only works with Genesis Framework (GPL-2.0+) as the parent theme. This is a paid premium product by StudioPress/ Copyblogger Media LLC, available via studiopress.com.

Then go to the “Widgets” admin page and configure your widgets for the “Archive Page Template #1 – #3”.

Enjoy your new archive page 🙂

Note: The “Genesis Framework” is required for this plugin in order to work. If you don’t own a copy it yet, this premium parent theme has to be bought. More info about that you’ll find here: http://ddwb.me/getgenesis

Usage: The plugin adds 3 new widget areas on your Widget Admin. Just place any widget in the #1 area and if you want to have columns use the optional 2nd and/ or 3rd area. That’s all. Enjoy!

Also note: This plugin needs NO settings page. You only need your default page edit screen and your widgets admin. Simplifying and no overbloat – you get the idea :).

Own translation/wording: For custom and update-secure language files please upload them to /wp-content/languages/genesis-widgetized-archive/ (just create this folder) – This enables you to use fully custom translations that won’t be overridden on plugin updates. Also, complete custom English wording is possible with that, just use a language file like genesis-widgetized-archive-en_US.mo/.po to achieve that (for creating one see the tools on “Other Notes”).

Why there are 3 new widget areas, isn’t ONE enough?

One should be enough for a lot of use cases. However, having 3 widget areas enables you to use up to 3 columns (see below), which makes sense to make it all more viewable. For example: you’ve given your archive page the ‘Full Width Content” layout option and use widgets in all 3 areas. Result: perfectly layered 3-column layout consisting of widgets. How cool’s that? 🙂

How do the columns work?

Column layouts are enabled automatically the same time you place any widget in the second or third widget area (implied the 1st is also active). The needed very few CSS styles are provided by the plugin (unfortunately not all child themes have these column classes included by default) and ONLY enqueued for that archive page (so very lightweight still!).

1st area OR 2nd area OR 3rd area active: one column layout

1st + 2nd OR 1st + 3rd OR 2nd + 3rd areas active: 2-column layout

all 3 areas active: 3-column layout

Are the widgetized areas responsive?

Yes, of course they are! If your child theme is already responsive and you use columnized areas they just adapt to your viewport nicely. Additionally, the break point for the 2-column and 3-column layout is set to 640px: so on smaller devices/viewports the columns automatically switch to an 100% width. — You can change all CSS media queries with !important or own styles (see below!).

Note, if your child theme isn’t responsive yet these CSS media queries won’t have any effect and also do no harm :-).

How can I remove the 2nd and 3rd widget areas?

That’s possible of course! Just add one or both of the following constants to your child theme’s functions.php file – or to a functionality plugin instead (recommended!):

It’s all done via your child theme. Maybe you need to add an !important to some CSS rules here and there… For more even better styling I included some IDs and classes:

Each widget in all areas gets an additional class: .gwat-archive — which allows to set some common styles for all widgets on the appropriate page!

“Archive Page Template #1” section:

whole content area, before & after all widgets is wrapped in a div with the ID: #gwat-archive-area-one plus class .gwat-archive-area

each widget in this area has its own ID depending on the widget (regular WordPress behavior!)

each widget gets an additional class: .gwat-archive-one — which allows to set some common styles for all widgets in this 1st area

“Archive Page Template #2” section (optional):

whole content area, before & after all widgets is wrapped in a div with the ID: #gwat-archive-area-two plus class .gwat-archive-area

each widget in this area has its own ID depending on the widget (regular WordPress behavior!)

each widget gets an additional class: .gwat-archive-two — which allows to set some common styles for all widgets in this 2nd area

“Archive Page Template #3” section (optional):

whole content area, before & after all widgets is wrapped in a div with the ID: #gwat-archive-area-three plus class .gwat-archive-area

each widget in this area has its own ID depending on the widget (regular WordPress behavior!)

each widget gets an additional class: .gwat-archive-three — which allows to set some common styles for all widgets in this 3rd area

If that’s still not enough, you can even enqueue your own style, an action hook is included for that: gwat_load_styles — This hook fires within the WordPress action hook wp_enqueue_scripts just after properly enqueueing the plugin’s styles and only if at least one of both widgets is active, so it’s fully conditional!

How can I add own stuff before & after the widgetized section but within #content?

You guess it, it’s just possible :). I have included 2 action hooks to achieve that. For example this could be useful for some admins who use more than one archive page or in general for Multisite installs.

Final note: I DON’T recommend to add customization code snippets to your child theme’s functions.php file! Please use a functionality plugin or an MU-plugin instead! This way you are then more independent from child theme changes etc. If you don’t know how to create such a plugin yourself just use one of my recommended ‘Code Snippets’ plugins. Read & bookmark these Sites:

All the custom & branding stuff code above can also be found as a Gist on GitHub: https://gist.github.com/4106349 (you can also add your questions/ feedback there 🙂

How can I use the advantages of this plugin for multlingual sites?

(1) In general: You may use it for “global” widgets.

(2) Usage with the “WPML” plugin:
Widgets can be translated with their “String Translation” component – this is much easier than adding complex information/instructions to the 404 error or search not found pages for a lot of languages…

You can use the awesome “Widget Logic” plugin (or similar ones) and add additional paramaters, mostly conditional stuff like is_home() in conjunction with is_language( 'de' ) etc. This way widget usage on a per-language basis is possible. Or you place in the WPML language codes like ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE == 'de' for German language. Fore more info on that see their blog post: http://wpml.org/2011/03/howto-display-different-widgets-per-language/

With the following language detection code you are now able to make conditional statements, in the same way other WordPress conditional functions work, like is_single(), is_home() etc.:

Note: Be careful with the function name ‘is_language’ – this only works if there’s no other function in your install with that name! If it’s already taken (very rare case though), then just add a prefix like my_custom_is_language().

Interested in development?

Changelog

1.2.1 (2013-09-05)

UPDATE: Tweaked widths of the columns in the packaged CSS styles to improve compatibility with even more child themes.

1.2.0 (2013-09-01)

NEW: Added support for Genesis 2.0+ when HTML5 is supported. That means: the widgetized content area gets hooked properly into the new G2.0 HTML5 hooks. (Note: This plugin is fully compatible with any Genesis XHTML child theme that didn’t modify the archive template.)

UPDATE: Loaded stylesheets now uses the WordPress convention for file names: gwat-styles.min.css (gwat-html5-styles.min.css) is the minified default version, plus, gwat-styles.css (gwat-html5-styles.css) is now the development version. If WP_DEBUG or SCRIPT_DEBUG constants are true, the dev styles will be loaded. This makes development/ customizing & debugging a lot easier! 🙂